Pilot Snags Wild Photo Of City … While Flying Jet

Published: August 20, 2014

Pilot Snags Wild Photo Of City … While Flying Jet, Last week, moments after an Airbus 320 lifted off from Charles de Gaulle airport and rose through the atmosphere, the jetliner’s captain whipped out a camera and snapped a series of photos of Paris as the early morning sunshine illuminated the low-hanging clouds that dropped a light rain on the metropolis. In two of the photos, the famed Eiffel Tower can be seen protruding through the cloud ceiling, along with the tops of several of the city’s tallest buildings — a fitting and unique perspective of the City of Light from about 15,000 feet up.

And these images are hardly the only in-flight photos shot from the cockpit, or, as pilot Jordi Martin Garcia calls it, his ‘office with a view.’

Garcia, 42, flies for Vueling Airlines, a discount airline based in Spain, and his typical routes have him ushering air passengers on trips across Europe and Northern Africa, he told AOL.com in an email response to a barrage of questions aimed at probing what’s been going on in his cockpit and his artist’s imagination.

Garcia is quick to point out that safety comes first. ‘My job is to be A320 Captain from second one to the end of the flight, so I click on the camera [only] when time permits,’ he said, adding that a few co-pilots have been taken aback when he’s taken out the camera in the cockpit. ‘My only occupation is [to] bring the plane from point A to B in the most safe way.’

But between the many A and B points to which Garcia has flown, he’s managed to amass a nifty collection of photos he’s shot during his hours up in the sky. The aerial photos of Paris, which Garcia posted on Twitter, are the latest additions.

Click through the slideshow above to see the Paris photos and a few of Garcia’s other favorite shots he’s snagged from the cockpit, which he shared exclusively with AOL.com.

One of the most fascinating images he’s captured is that of a dreamy phenomenon that aviators refer to as a ‘captain’s halo.’

The technical term for the effect is a Brocken spectre, or Brocken bow.

‘It is the apparently enormous and magnified shadow of an observer or object cast upon the upper surfaces of clouds opposite the sun,’ Garcia explained.

The Brocken spectre ‘is a bewitching optical phenomenon that occurs when a low-lying sun casts a very long shadow into mist or fog in the distance. The effect creates a supersized shadow figure, which looks three dimensional because of the depth at which the shadow descends into the mist,’ Garcia went on to say.

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